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尼達． 辛諾克羅特

Nida SINNOKROT

Featuring: Micha MAGEE
Date of presentation: October 8–27, 2016
Gallery F, basement

A woman opening a door becomes a transformative experience in this 16mm film installation by Palestinian artist Nida Sinnokrot. The imagery takes on an ephemeral painterly quality, changing tone as the film’s emulsion slowly becomes exposed though tiny scratches, registered with every step of the audience. In turn the projections themselves alternate from dark to light; exposing, like a camera shutter, the mechanics of the installation. Here questions of power, gesture, surface, space, and agency are raised, provoking an examination of the machine and its material impact on representation.

When Her Eyes Lifted marks a debut rendition of work Nida began in 1998 on what he calls “Horizontal Cinema.” With this novel reinvention of the cinematic apparatus—presented here as a twisted constellation of mechanisms arranged on a worn carpet, traditional projections are turned on their side and stripped of their formalism. The projected images are not bound by 24 framesper-second, but rather move with varying speed depending on audience interaction. The constituent parts of the filmic vocabulary are thus reconstructed like Chinese scroll paintings that reveal themselves in response to the viewer’s movements. Here, images that precede and follow are seen together, creating multiple planes in which past, present and future exist simultaneously. This alternative grammar, a natural extension of immigrant and refugee expression, evokes the way memory intersects reality in what Edward Said (1935–2003) described as “contrapuntal consciousness.”

Engineering support: Robert BIELECKI
Technical support: Marcell MARS
Production support: Akademie Schloss
Solitude and Merz Akademie